Weekend plans with Wildfire Laboratories (wildfirelaboratories.com). And if someone has a used Lucy Says No (same manufacturer) module up for grabs, please let me know. Thanks. I’d appreciate it.
Weekend Plans
Ins and outs
Category: studio journal
Video, audio, patch notes
A Minor Technical Victory
Adding a mic to the Dirtywave M8
This weekend I surprised myself by sorting out a solution to a technical problem I’ve been bothered by. There’s a small piece of music equipment called the M8, which is the sole product made by a small company called Dirtywave (dirtywave.com), based in Los Angeles. The M8 is a “tracker,” a term for a manner of sequencing music. Working in a tracker looks sort of like composing in a spreadsheet, which may sound unappealing, but if you’ve gotten good at working in a spreadsheet then you know how just how powerful muscle memory can be, much as is the case with “traditional” instruments. (I put the word “traditional” in quotes because trackers have been around since the late 1980s, over 30 years. I’m not sure when something becomes “traditional,” but trackers are by no means new.) I used to play with a tracker on my various Palm Pilots back in the day, but hadn’t used one in a long time, even as they’ve recently experienced something of a resurgence in popularity.
What appealed to me about the M8 (versus the Tracker from Polyend, or the software Renoise that could run on my laptop) was its portability. As shown in the photo, it’s not much larger than a phone. In addition, the keyboard has been reduced to a literal handful. The software, which Dirtywave has updated regularly, is quite powerful. And as has become essentially required of new music equipment, there is a great online forum where users discuss the M8, and share tips and examples of their work.
Two things, however, have bugged me about the M8: one hardware, one software. The software matter is that, far as I can tell, it can’t process live sound. I can record music into the M8 and process it, but I can’t process music live. Perhaps that will change with future upgrades. (It also may not solely be a software issue.)
The hardware issue involves recording: for all its inputs and outputs, the M8 doesn’t have a built-in microphone. And for it to use an external microphone, the mic has to be powered (that is, at “line level,” rather than “mic level”). So, not only do I have to use an external microphone to record audio as samples, that mic must be powered. I wanted a portable mic, and I couldn’t find a powered, line-level mic that would fit in the M8’s case. Part of the beauty of the M8 is its portability. A large mic reduces portability.
And now I’ve sorted out a good solution to the “easily portable microphone for the M8” matter: By using a simple mic app and a Lightning-to-audio dongle, I can turn my phone into a mic and plug it directly into the M8. When I first tried to do this, the feedback was alarming. The key thing is to turn the speaker in the microphone app to zero. That nixes the feedback. I can also just record to the phone and play back into the M8 this way. It works really well (I have an iPhone, but it would work with Android, too). And yeah, I’ll likely use feedback on purpose down the road. (The reason the cable in the photo is so long is that I briefly experimented, earlier in this process, with putting my phone really far from the M8 to avoid feedback, before I realized I could fix things by turning off the app’s speaker function.)
Technically, I haven’t found a microphone that fits in the M8 case, my original goal, but since I’ve always got my phone with me anyhow, this is a totally acceptable solution — and better yet, I didn’t need to make any additional purchases, aside from the microphone app, which cost just a couple bucks.
Office Accessory
An ongoing series cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt
New workspace essential. Really nice. The mono mix out puts the guitar into the left and right channels, and uses a 3.5mm jack — so: right into the headphones; no adapter needed. And no, I’m not playing it loud through the headphones. This is just for practicing half an hour or so — and for not bothering other people with (currently) the minor pentatonic on repeat all over the fretboard.
Space Less Constrained
Saturday afternoon, April 23, 2022
An afternoon by a local lake in Golden Gate Park, traffic behind me and filtered through trees, joggers and baby carriages this way and that but not too numerous, the more prominent motors heard here not of street vehicles but of tiny little remote-controlled boats that enthusiasts bring to the manufactured water feature and race around regularly amid geese, turtles, and the occasional surface-breaching fish. The scene this past Saturday afternoon, banh mi and ebook in hand, was much more idyllic in person, I assure you. The birdsong was more prominent and diverse. The sense of space was less constrained. And the growling gusto of those hobbyist machines was significantly reduced in the context of the boats’ minuscule size.
A Chorus of Sorts
On the way back from Brooklyn
The subway was my destination, and all the more so when I reached the top of the staircase. This was in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, last week, toward the end of a recent trip I took back east. I’ve since returned to the Bay Area, where the world is considerably less dense — with people, with activity, with sound. In Greenpoint, it seemed, in that moment — in the moment preceding this audio — like a chorus might be performing down below the surface of the city, the voices gaining heft in the twisting, tiled hallways. I was in no rush to return to Manhattan, so when I took my first step down, I was looking forward to lingering. Buskers are one thing. Buskers transformed by the cavernous sound conduit that is a subway is something else entirely.
However, as is often the case with audio illusions (or hallucinations, perhaps), the impression I had fallen prey to was dispelled the moment I reached for my phone’s record button. It’s not simply a matter that I can’t hear the chorus in the audio I recorded. It’s that I no longer heard it when I was there. It simply evaporated. But the change in atmosphere did not deter me. I continued to record as I made my way.
You can hear those footsteps, my foosteps, here. I had two pairs of footwear on the trip: sneakers that are like marshmallows, and boot-like shoes that are firm as tires. This day was a tire day, and the hard tap of each step is evident. Once upon a time, the presence of those footsteps in the recording would have disappointed me. I would have thought of evidence of my being in the place as a taint. Instead, the footsteps lend a linear context to the sounds. They confirm for a listener, even one who was not present at the time, that space is being navigated. And I was, in the end, rewarded with a voice — not a chorus, per se, but a municipal announcement so utterly altered by the echo that it became a sort of chorus itself. Perhaps the very chorus that had caught my imagination earlier on.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/disquiet.